Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten Podcast.
And joining me today is David Pierce, otherwise known as At Tufty the Cat, but the cat is now out
of the bag, who joins me to talk about Craig Wright, fake Toshi. And before anybody starts
thinking, oh, this is just going to be another takedown of BSVers, and that's not the case.
And I hope that somehow, somewhere, somebody that is holding BSV does get to listen to this episode and even goes back and listens to another episode that I've released back on 27th of August, 2025 with Mark Hunter and Arthur Van Pelt.
It's episode 559. They have written what's going to be a series of books about Craig Wright and his claims of being Satoshi.
if you are like i said part of the bsv crowd listen to this with an open mind this is not
a bashing session it's not what we are here to do use it as a tool to help educate yourself
about the asset that you currently hold that's it take from it what you will that's all i will say
about it. David is here to share his experience of the court case. He was there watching the whole
thing unfold and his experience as a patent lawyer and what he found digging into some of the
hundreds of patents. There's the flag there already. Hundreds of patents that had been filed
or were continually being filed by Craig
and how he found some of them to be fraudulent,
for want of a better word,
and removed, rescinded.
Interesting battles.
Very interesting battles.
But you've got to dig through this kind of stuff
to find the truth behind some of the stories
that have been put out there.
So one quick fact for you guys.
I've just checked on Fountain app where a lot of the listeners have switched to now.
So thank you for doing that.
If you've not switched to listening to Fountain or watching, all audio and video goes on Fountain 24 hours before general release.
Subscribers to the show get that ad free as well.
So you don't get me blaring at the beginning or at the end giving the shout outs to the show sponsors.
you just get the pure conversation they're building a great tool over there for bitcoiners
who are looking to escape the walled garden systems of spotify or apple pods or google
pods wherever it is you're listening currently get over to fountain and i just checked the stats over
there 19 of the listeners are coming from china that's the number two country tuning in to the
Once Bitten podcast. That's crazy to me. Ni hao China. Thank you so much for listening and
I hope you're getting a lot of information and education from the conversations from this podcast.
It's a crazy stat for me to see. I've never seen that before so maybe that is an indicator of
what's going on thank you again to everybody that boosts the show or streams sats to the show
really appreciate that it's just a brilliant way to interact with people i love seeing those sats
come in i've even been getting people reach out on orange pill app directly and boosting me on
the orange pill app excuse me club orange club orange daniel my goodness club orange the rebrand
is real uh yeah shout out to bits thank you for the boosts and sending sats across the wires
straight into my club orange lightning wallet which works perfectly well and if you're not in
club orange you 100 should be even just to check it out for a few months if it doesn't work for you
cancel the subscription you've lost nothing other than a few sats but what you might have gained the
opportunity cost of not joining Club Orange is immeasurable. You could literally meet your next
best friend. You could literally meet your next partner in life. You could literally meet, whether
that's business or romantic, right? You know, the idea of Club Orange being a dating app was always
a bit of a meme, but, you know, we've had marriages. We've got our first Club Orange baby.
it's just so great to see
but you also get partnerships from people that go out and build shit
and start making projects
and that's what's so great to see as well
before we get into this rip with David
please bear with me as I give a few shout outs for the show sponsors
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I have just run out of music
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Thank you again, everybody for listening.
Paywithflash.com.
This is the last time you're gonna hear anything from me
and paywithflash.com for a little while.
They're going dark, but that is not bearish.
That's bullish.
They've got things to build.
They've seen a little crack in the market
where they know they can add value.
So they're going to get their heads down.
So keep a very close attention to what they're doing.
It's paywithflash.com.
Get over there.
And like I said, join Club Orange.
You can hit the link in the show notes.
There's a referral link there.
And take self-custody very seriously.
bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten.
Let's get into this one with David.
Thank you, everybody, again for listening.
I hope you enjoy this show.
All right, David.
Great to see you again.
We met in Manchester.
Lauren wasn't there, so she didn't get a chance to meet you.
and uh we had a great discussion and i wanted to bring you on the show to talk about many things
but uh lauren as usual is going to hit you with the first question so thank you uh what did it
feel like when you figured out all the seed phrases from the obvious book oh we're on that
already um yeah but now for the listeners for the no no that's fine for the listeners a little bit
of context, Avi Burra, a mutual friend of ours, he wrote a book called 24, fictional book about
Bitcoin. Well, not entirely about Bitcoin. It's a great fictional book. Please go and read it. It's
a brilliant journey. And he's now written and released his new one, which I've also read and
really enjoyed. And in both books, he hid a seed phrase. So David, how did you find the seed phrase
and claim the Bitcoin and feel free to share whether, you know,
the amount, if you're happy to do that or not.
And yeah, and then Lauren's question is,
how did that make you feel when you put the words in and saw that transaction?
Well, yeah, I'll answer that first.
I remember distinctly where I was.
It was a Saturday evening.
I was sat on the sofa.
I'd had a few conversations with another guy who was helping me, who had a big computer.
And I got the message from him.
And I was, let's put it mildly, gobsmacked.
I was astonished because he just sent me a message saying, yep, done it.
And then wanted to wait until the transaction had confirmed.
And then about 10 minutes later said, yep, we've got it.
and here's the 24 words in the right order.
So that was astonishing because I'd spent a few weeks
trying to figure out the order.
Because I don't know if you know the way the clues are presented in the book.
No.
You've got the 24 words, which is just the titles of the chapters,
the 24 chapters.
It can't be that simple.
Oh, God.
So, I mean, that's the first thing you figure out,
but that's fairly easy.
You just read the book and then eventually you go, oh, oh, yeah.
Well, it's just those 24 words.
And then you think, is that, well, it's clearly not that.
But then you start looking into, well, there's various poems and things in the book.
And the non-smeister keeps coming up and read it through again and thought, there's something there, but I can't quite get it.
And I started, as usual, I start to overcomplicate things.
And I started thinking, oh, maybe there's one of the characters where there's some of the poems.
There's some clues in there.
And you start seeing, oh, it's full of seed phrases.
So eventually I realized, well, that's all red herrings.
And came back to the titles of the 24 chapters and realized that, actually,
if you think of the number of combinations of that you can put 24 words in just rearrange them
in in any order the number of combinations is absolutely massive even with just the same 24
words so it not feasible to to even plug that into a computer and say give me the right order because the number the number of times you have to go through and make guesses is is absolutely
enormous so i mean it's nowhere near the number that you'd have for the the two to the power of
256 combinations you have for a for any seed phrase but it limits the space down to still a
very very big space but i thought well that could be it and in that case it's just a question of
switching some of the switching the the order around and there must be clues that that give
you that and that's that's the way i started going so i created a spreadsheet and started
putting some possibilities in and spent probably a week or two in my spare time
trying to figure out what possibilities there would be.
And I ended up, I think I ended up getting to about,
I got to 14 words
which could be in one place or another,
if that makes sense.
So I didn't get anywhere near the 24 all in the right order,
but I got to the point where 14 of them were either here or there.
And all of them were either here or there.
but there was one that was only one place.
And I thought, surely that must be computable now.
And then this guy popped up on Twitter.
I mentioned it a few times that I was looking into it,
but I didn't give anyone any clues.
Mentioned it a few times, and this guy called Proof of Duck popped up.
And his business is solving seed phrases.
So if you've got your seed phrase compromised or your wallet has been corrupted in some way or you can't quite remember the password, there are ways that you can compute the answer.
And that's what it sounds like he did for a living.
And he said, well, do you want to share what you've got?
And I could plug in the rest and figure it out.
And I thought, oh, I don't really trust this guy.
So I replied back and said, let me have a few more goes.
And then looked into it a few more times and thought and realized, yeah, unless I get a few more words, I don't think I've got the ability to do this.
So I went, OK.
And he said, well, we split it 50-50.
And I went, OK, here's what I've got so far, sent you in the spreadsheet.
and this was sort of Saturday afternoon
and then by Saturday evening
he solved it.
So it turned out
with the right sort of
simple bit of coding
and a high power computer
it was doable in, I think he said
it only took the computer a couple of hours to do it
so it churned through all the combinations
based on the starting point of where I got to.
so it was it was kind of i mean whether you call it half and half or he did all the work and i did
a very minor part of it i don't know but we split it 50 50 and i think it was
uh what was it one no 13 million sats right something like that so a fair amount yeah
it was worth the effort but it was it was um yeah i think it was quite
If memory serves, I think
Avi put up a million sats and then people donated
to the address, maybe.
Yeah,
I think he put
10 million and there
was an extra 3 million that ended up...
Excuse me, yes, that's what I meant.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, because he made the address
public, just so you could
see that it was there, so you could
see how much people were chipping
in.
um but yeah just had to work out the private key simple i can't believe it was a chapter i'm
thinking like i was thinking of like the the seed phrases being the chapters but i'm like surely
that's just too easy now i thought david that was the red herring i thought that the chapters were
the red herring and i'm like there's nowhere in the world it's the chapters right no time
that's where i started i thought sure surely not yeah but once he realized that the number
of combinations are so huge it becomes a possibility so have you read book number two
yes i think it's better it is better rv you brilliant man it's an absolute
beautiful book i really loved it and yeah i really found his stride with writing
Yeah, I wrote a little review of it on there. I stuck it on Amazon. And I'm thinking it's effectively a combination of a detective story, a James Bond thriller, with elements of Douglas Adams and Salman Rushdie thrown in.
because there are the Douglas Adams bit I know that Avi is a fan of Douglas Adams
and certainly of Salman Rushdie and it's the it's the implausible
coincidences that happen throughout the book there's there's quite a few of them
and you think it drives the story along but there's elements of that magical realism combined
with this is completely implausible for this to happen.
But we're already in that with having read 24.
You know, it's magical.
It's supposed to be magical, but with elements of reality in it.
And with the sacred geometry angle, which is a really nice touch as well.
Yeah, yeah.
It's all fascinating that you try and picture this,
what is it, four-dimensional spiral or something.
It's crazy.
The Hexelion, which I don't know if you made that word up, but it was really lovely because Claire and I, we were in New York for November for the Smash Toshi history of Bitcoin launch that they did at PubKey there.
And I helped them host the panel.
And Avi was in town.
So Avi hung out with us and with his wife and Ishan as well.
and when we were walking around New York because
the book is, both books based
in New York, it would just be pointing
places, this is where that's seen and this is
where that's seen, obviously in
the second book there's a lot that takes
place in Pub Key and
Washington
Park just next door
so that was really
tangible because I'd started reading the second
book on the way, on the flight
and I was flying through
it and it was just really
very captivating
for sure yeah yeah agreed that's what i i wanted to do when i was reading it but thinking i should
uh i need to i need to go to new york and see all these places because they're very specific
yeah that's it and we got the second one here here it is so for those that are watching on fountain
uh july 18th there's the the second book by avi and there is still a bounty up for grabs as far
as I'm aware. How well are you doing with solving this one?
I'm not doing this one. I knew when I first had a chat with Javier
after I'd solved the first one, well, apart solved the first one,
that he was quite clear that the next time it was going to be hard.
I thought, I'm no good at crossword clues.
so anything
vaguely cryptic
rather than mechanical
I'm going to have
no idea of how to do
because solving the first one was
more or less mechanical, it was all about
the Nonsmeister's poems
the Nonsmeister's songs
because in there
it was all the suggestions
of how to switch one number with another
so it was fairly
straightforward to get to
14 using that i'm sure there were lots of other clues and and avi said there were lots of other
cryptic clues um but i certainly didn't get them i'm not sure how many other people got them
so i i think that the clues in the second one are going to be a lot more cryptic
my mind went actually to the the sacred geometry and i was thinking huh i wonder if that's a border
wallets thing and you draw like the the pattern onto a border wallets and that would highlight
x amount of words and then you've got to get and then i just oh stop thinking about it dan
get them with life this isn't my game yeah the way way beyond my my knowledge i know a bit about
bitcoin but you know i'm not going to go into that sort of detail so there you go lauren that's the
treasure hunt through rb's first book this is his second book there's more bitcoin waiting i don't
know how much uh i don't think he's even going to post the address this time when i spoke to him in
manchester uh he said um he's not going to be posting the address which is a shame because i'd
have donated a few more sats to top it up and uh and keep people interested um but yeah so cool
story did you have any follow-up questions lauren no but that kind of sounded like a fun roller
coaster to be on finding all the secrets and being like a detective yeah it's cool it made the book
far more interesting and i'm sure lots of there were there were quite a few other people that
were that were looking into it as well um you know the guy fractal encrypt yeah who does the
the big sculptures uh he was trying to do it as well and um expressed frustration when i got it
And I found out yesterday via Simon, you know, Simon of Al,
that Joe Martin, he hid a seed phrase in his song, The Jetsons,
which somebody has since solved and claimed bounty Yeah So it really cool these little fun games that uh that people are uh putting into their work yeah right well thank you lauren for kicking us off
thank you for answering my questions thank you lauren pleasure yeah thank you bye bye
all right david we should probably kick off with the good old-fashioned bitcoin rabbit hole story
what brings us together and you and i talking about treasure hunting through
a fictional book about magic internet money yeah it's crazy really yeah um i've done i've done a
few podcasts and i think i may well not be consistent with my story because i can't quite
remember i can't quite pin when i first started investigating bitcoin or whether i first
heard about it probably first heard about it in i don't know 2016 17 but didn't do anything about
it i think i got some in 2017 but then just sat on it i didn't actually go down the rabbit hole
um but it was um i don't know if you've seen my interviews with gabby male i did a couple of years
ago uh you don't need to watch those but um as i mentioned to him he's um i've probably got craig
right to thank for me looking into and learning about bitcoin because that was probably my
proper introduction and started in about 2020 um because i noticed all these patent
applications were being filed um and it was all related to this guy who was supposedly
Satoshi Nakamoto so I started looking into it and and got involved with um this thing that was
called I get my terminology right they were calling themselves the open crypto alliance
which is not the crypto open patent alliance which is copa yeah no but the open the open
Patent Alliance was just a loose group of people who I think, I'm not quite sure how
I got in touch with them, but involved.
Stephan Kinsella was on there, who I'm sure you're aware of or know, might have even met.
Patent attorney who's very anti-patent.
US patent attorney
who's very anti-patent
and libertarian and
Mises Institute and all that stuff
so he was on there
and we spent
several months
going
through various
options
of what we might do with
Craig Wright's patenting
and eventually came to the conclusion
that it was all a bit pointless
but during
that period this was all my introduction to bitcoin so i was reading up all these all this
technical stuff uh reading the the usual books um ended up reading um it's just behind me
andres antonopoulos's 2014 edition of mastering bitcoin um which is turns out to be pretty good
prior art because it goes into the technical detail as well as all the you know the usual
what it does as well as,
but it goes into the detail of how it does it.
So it has the code as well and the op codes and all that stuff.
So I got to that sort of base level detail of how Bitcoin works
with a view of thinking, well, how can anyone patent any of this?
Because it's all in this book in 2014.
But that seemed to be what Enchain was doing.
so the opening patent allowance
didn't really go anywhere
there wasn't really
any interest in trying to knock down
any of Craig Wright's patents
certainly wasn't any
money around to do it
and then
do you want to get into
that story because that's sort of
where it leads to really
so
So just to give people, like, you know, round out that story,
that part of your life, the reason you're looking at patents
is because this is your day job, right?
This is how you're mining your fear.
And is this a career that you've...
Yeah.
Before we take that next step,
I was thinking that's the rabbit hole that we can go down,
but they to take a few steps back i started my second career as it turned out um as a patent
attorney in 2003 2004 after i'd been a um a researcher so i was doing research into
piers of electric materials doesn't really matter you don't need to understand what they are
Here's your electricity.
Peasoelectricity, yes.
Right.
That's electricity that's created when you tightly pack something together.
Am I correct?
Yeah, more or less.
Yeah, quarters of peasoelectric.
So you squash it, it generates an electric field.
And conversely, you apply an electric field and it changes shape.
So these effects are on a very, very small scale.
so you're talking microns of movement and thousands of volts so they're but you'll see them in
a cigarette lighter that goes a cigarette lighter that goes click and creates a flame
has a tiny little piezoelectric chunk inside it so a hammer hits that chunk and it generates a
high voltage which generates the spark so these the same the same material that is used in in
cigarette lighters uh i was playing with um yeah it was really playing it was researching but
researching is playing if you find it interesting so i was doing that at university as a postdoc
researcher and um i was making springs with it so i was making making these ceramic springs
and i invented this thing that was in the form of a first order super helical piezoelectric
actuator it's a coiled coil this is all completely irrelevant but it's not but it's really cool
people love these little side rabbit holes and so what what would that research what were you hoping
to i mean this could potentially be linked to like a perpetual motion and all this kind of stuff
right is this where people in that field kind of like go to you do see the quite often you see
perpetual motion applications that people file and they always get refused and it's quite a common
thing that uh people file at the patent office and i read the decisions and they're quite amusing
and you think but why who is this nutcase this is this is real what i was doing was was real it did
work and i ended up making quite a quite a beautiful little thing because it was it was
pretty because it was a coiled coil if you imagine a you take a spring and then you take the axis of
that spring and turn it into another coil you've got a coiled coil um and if you make that out of a
piezoelectric material you can make the the coil twist and the twisting action of that coil makes
the coiled coil elongate linearly.
So it amplifies these very, very small movements
into a very large movement.
And I had this thing that we ended up calling it a worm
because it was just, it was about 34 centimetres diameter,
this coiled coil, and coated in platinum,
so it looked quite pretty.
And it moved about a centimetre up and down
when you applied this voltage to it of a few hundred volts,
which I thought was pretty cool at the time
because normally you get, you know,
you're measuring these things with a microscope
and you can see it moving a centimetre.
So that was pretty good.
So that got patented.
And the reason this led me onto my second career
is that this thing got patented.
What could have been the practical applications for that?
You know, if it was built at scale or even at nanoscale?
Well, there was an application that was developed, and I worked for a company for a while that took on this patented invention and put them in.
The application that they wanted to use this in was in mobile phone cameras.
So this was around 2000, 2001.
So cameras were getting better in mobile phones at the time.
and the problem was that they didn't have a mechanism to auto focus them and these are tiny
tiny lenses that had to move maybe a few hundred microns so which is still quite quite a lot for a
mechanism to do and and this this invention of mine was a possibility of you know you wrap the
coil around the lens and you can make it you can make it move the the desired amount and these these
things were made and prototypes were made and i think they ended up making maybe a few hundred
thousand um as a sort of prototype level that's prototype level for mobile phones so they ended
up i i went to taiwan a few times and these things got made in china and i forget which company
they're working with probably sony ericsson uh ended up making a few hundred thousand of these
and then cancelled it.
So it's one of those things that could have been,
but didn't quite make it.
By that point I decided to switch career because I was more interested in the patenting side rather than the engineering development side which I to be honest I found quite scary
So I switched career, went and did an MSC at Queen Mary in London on intellectual property, which was really good.
but I'm assuming it's still going
but that was a brilliant course that they did
so patents, trademarks, copyrights
competition law
also the whole lot
and then got a
got a trainee position
in Nottingham
and did the rest of my exams
over the few years after then
a huge number of exams you have to do
to become a qualified patent attorney
and I qualified in 2009
finally, UK and European.
So you qualified to practice before the UK Patent Office
and the European Patent Office, which are similar qualifications
but different exams.
So there's about 15 or 16 exams in all you have to take and pass.
So from there, I've been doing that job now for, yeah, 20 years.
working in well working where I'm now at home in between Birmingham Nottingham I work for a company
in Birmingham now and a lot of my work is drafting patent applications and what we call prosecuting
them so taking them through from filing them at the UK patent office or European patent office
all the way through to being granted, which can take a few years.
And also I deal with opposition work at the European Patent Office, EPO,
on either side.
So I've opposed people's patents, try and knock them down.
I've also defended against other people trying to oppose my client's patents.
And that's pretty fun.
I mean, that's scary, but it's quite fun when you have to go to...
a lot of it is in written procedure.
So there's a lot of written stuff going to and fro,
but you end up usually in a hearing,
which are all held online now,
but a few years ago it was all in person.
So I'd spend lots of trips to Munich,
which is where the European Patent Office is.
And then you have to present your case before a tribunal.
So three senior examiners at the EPO
and the other side's there if it's an opposition
and you have to argue your case, they argue their case.
It's a bit like a court.
So I'm a bit like a barrister in that setting.
And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
But that's the sort of, you know, the fun bit of the job, I suppose.
But most of it is doing the, putting together arguments,
trying to find things in an application that might be allowable,
arguing the case with the examiner, trying to get it through to Grant.
So that's what I was doing up until, well, I'm still doing all that,
but that's my lead-up to how I got into Craig Wright and Enshan's patents,
patenting activities, just out of interest,
because I thought, well, I think the introduction to the thing
that got me interested was why are they filing so many?
And this came up initially in 2017 or thereabouts
when people were, something popped up, I can't remember where it was,
but something popped up and made me think, oh, what's that?
Why have they filed, at that point, 70 patent applications in one year?
I thought, that's a lot.
For a small UK company, filing 70 patent applications,
one or two every week for a year, that's unusual.
Is there a cost connected to filing?
Not when you file at the...
There is a cost for filing, but at the UK Patent Office,
the fees are pretty low.
I think you pay about £200, so it's not expensive to file at the UK office.
But if you're using a patent attorney, we're not cheap.
So you'd have to spend several thousand to get the thing prepared for filing.
So if you're filing 70 times £5,000 or £10,000 a pop, you're talking serious money.
so they clearly had some serious backing behind them at that point.
So immediately a red flag for you.
Small company filing all of these patents,
clearly burning through cash, which is hard.
That in itself is not really a red flag.
It just makes me think, oh, that's unusual.
What's the reason they're doing this?
it's not necessarily a red flag for a small company to be filing lots of patent applications
because they might have loads of great inventions and they might have lots of money behind them
people do that it's still unusual but it does happen um the thing that made it you know the
red flags were really the the idea that craig wright might be satoshi nakamoto and five minutes
research if you've got if you've got half a brain will will make you realize that no he's not uh
so that's that's where it the the real interest started really um so that that that sort of got
me to where did I start looking properly that early 2021 I was just looking through my previous
blog posts, I started posting blog articles about
what are they doing? And the first one was in February
2021. I was just doing, oh, here's how many they've filed
and they're starting to get things granted as well. So I think by that point
they'd got nearly 60 patents granted by the EPO,
which is quite good going. And they'd filed
maybe 300, something like that. So it was
big numbers but they carried on filing 70 or so a year for several years um and they were getting
them through the system um so do you want to explain for people that that might not be aware
what n-chain was yeah well at n-chain you've you were taught you you interviewed um mark and
recently on the
Fectosia book, so I don't need to go
into all the nitty-gritty
of why Craig Wright
is not Satoshi, but
the starting
point of the story, really,
back in 2015
is...
And the story really is
best set out in that
article, The Satoshi Affair,
Andrew O'Hagan,
I think that's the guy's name,
that's the one to read.
Because that still, I keep going back to that and rereading it,
thinking this guy had it absolutely spot on in 2016.
I think that's when it came out.
But it goes back to the sort of mid-2015
when Craig Wright and Stefan Matthews pulled in Calvin Ayer
to get his money to do the thing that turned into N-Chain.
and I think it was late 2015 when Craig Wright moved over to the UK.
Why it was in the UK, I don't know, but he came to the UK,
set up N-Chain and the purpose of the company was effectively
to patent everything by this supposed Satoshi.
And then from Calvin Ayer's perspective,
once you've got everything patented then you'd be able to sell it for billions to
i don't know ibm google whoever so the the whole purpose from the start was to
create this portfolio of patented technology covering aspects of bitcoin which in itself
made really no sense because bitcoin had already been around for several years by that point but
okay, they were trying to patent some things to do around Bitcoin
that Craig Wright was coming up with.
And they started and filed their first application in February 2016
and just carried on for several years.
You okay?
Yes.
so that's
from February 2016
it's probably worth just going into a little
detail about how the patent filing
system works so they filed
their first applications in the UK
so they got
their person
to prepare
the filings
filed it at the UK patent office
and then
they used those as what we call
priority filing and then 12 months later they would file what's known as an international
application and then they get published and they work through the system and then another
18 months down the line, so this is two and a half years from this original UK filing
date, they then turn into European applications, US applications, US applications, US,
I think they file in Japan, China, a few other places.
So this one filing in February 2016 then turns into an international application,
which doesn't get granted itself, but turns into a European, a US, a Chinese, a Japanese.
So it sort of balloons out into multiple applications throughout the world.
So one filing will end up costing certainly tens of thousands of pounds.
And they ended up filing over 500.
Wow.
So over 500 of these original GB UK filings
that then has ballooned out into thousands of applications
throughout the world and many granted patents.
I've only looked at it from the European perspective.
I can't be bothered to go any wider than that.
But you can see there are lots of US ones, lots of Japanese ones, lots of other ones everywhere.
But my work is mainly through the European Patents Office, so I've been looking at that.
So I'm looking at one particular aspect of it.
So it's complicated.
It's even hard to pin down what the numbers are of how many they've actually got, because it depends how you count them.
So if you ask how many patents does Craig Wright have,
he'll say, oh, I've got thousands.
Actually, he doesn't have any at all,
because none of them are owned by him.
They're all owned by Enchain.
And that was the purpose of Enchain,
to pull together and eventually monetize all these inventions.
so any inventions that come in are all assigned to nchain the company which the holding company is
a swiss a swiss company so it's held by this swiss company throughout the world and then
something happens um they're licensed somehow i've not seen any evidence of them being licensed but
That is what happens with holding companies.
They're set up to hold and license IP.
Same as how I think the business model, the intended business model,
is something like how Starbucks works.
So Starbucks has the holding company which owns the IP,
which is basically the trademark, the Starbucks trademark,
and that is a company in wherever it is.
I don't know, Ireland, Switzerland probably.
And that will license the IP to all the subsidiary companies
in different countries, and they will then pay this holding company,
and it's a way of avoiding local taxes in some ways.
So you can pull all the value that gets accumulated
in that one big holding company.
So that's the business model.
If you've got viable technology that people want to pay for,
that's perfectly fine.
That's what people do.
That's what companies are set up to do.
For Inchain, though, it's a bit different
because they're based on a lie.
And once you see that lie,
everything starts to look a bit different.
The lie being the claim that he was someone he is not.
Yeah, the central...
There's a very good quote from the judgment,
the Coper and Wright judgment from last year.
Let me see if I can just find it.
The main judgments...
Right at the beginning.
Yeah, there we go.
In paragraph three of the Coper and Wright judgment, Mr. Justice Mellor says,
Many of Dr. Wright's lies contained a grain of truth, which sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar.
But there were many which did not and were outright lies.
as soon as one lie was exposed
Dr. Wright resorted to further lies
and evasion
the final destination
I think is the central
the bottom left is the central lie
yeah there's a part in there
where he says it all relates to his central lie
which was his claim to be
Satoshi Nakamoto
so it's
that central lie
is what Enchain was built on
although
there are, it's been
Lots of things have been built on top of that.
So, you know, it's all built on the, well, it didn't start with BSV,
but it ended up being the sort of basis for how BSV developed
as from 2018 or 2019 when it started.
So Enchain started before BSV started,
but it then became the, this is the technology behind BSV.
This is how we're going to develop BSV and make it into this world-beating thing, whatever it is.
Someone popped up today, and what's the... Pied Piper, that's the thing.
So in Silicon Valley, have you seen the series, Silicon Valley?
No.
someone popped up on Xtazay saying,
I've just started watching series six of Silicon Valley,
and it seems to me that Pied Piper is essentially BSV.
So the whole thing being, the suggestion being,
the whole thing is never going to work.
Wow.
And it's all a bit of a, it's all nonsense,
which is more or less what Silicon Valley is all about.
You know, it's all vaporware.
and none of it actually works and then people can carry on for years and years with something
that's never actually going to work it's already been it's already been so long and it's already
been a long time since the since that judgment since that wording like and anybody and it's
still alive it's it's truly unbelievable at this point um it shows you the skills of a charlatan
to you know to have gone through court and then convinced people i've heard people say
this is the cabal trying to bring down satoshi nakamoto you're like oh my goodness guys like
really what what do you need to see is the smoking gun not enough uh for you to um and then see the
guy uh be um you know with this judgment and then you know contempt of court because he didn't go
back and then flee the country like but yet he still has these these minions that support him
and cry foul play from the establishment and the they you know like i'm no fan of the the legal
system at all and you know very rarely is justice ever you know dealt and we could look at like what
happened in the samurai case recently you know just an absolute aberration of justice but for this one
i mean like what you read out is pretty spot on like that you know no flies on these guys
for this one.
Yeah, you mentioned the cabal.
I don't know if you're aware that I've been accused
by BSV supporters of being at the centre of this cabal,
me personally.
So there was a story, I mean, we could get into this.
I've mentioned it a few times, but the idea was,
and this is from a guy like Scott Gillis,
I think he's 369BSV on X, some crazy guy from Wales.
He was at the trial.
And he put up this petition on change.org that was effectively accusing me personally of biasing the judge,
so Mr Justice Mellor
into deciding against Craig
in the Kerpen Wright trial
which is just crazy
What was his basis there?
Is that because you challenged some of the patents
and therefore you were undermining his
No, we haven't even got into that, have we?
But the basis was that I met the guy a couple of times
So I met James Muller a couple of times.
The oddest coincidence was, although it was not that massive a coincidence,
because as part of my job as a patent attorney,
I'm involved in this pan-European organization of IP lawyers,
mainly patent attorneys, called Union IP.
So I go to various places around Europe.
It's quite a nice thing to be involved with,
because you get to meet all these attorneys from around Europe,
which is a good European thing rather than being all insular and UK-focused.
And there's this one that's held every February in Munich
where they have what they call a roundtable
to discuss the latest thing in patent world across Europe.
And it quite a well thing and they have people from the EPO some senior people from the EPO They have and they always invite judges from around Europe
So they'd have, they'd often have a judge from the UK.
So we've had people like Robin Jacob and Colin Burse.
And one year in 2023, someone had invited James Muller.
And didn't know who he was.
I think it was a fairly recent addition to the High Court judges,
and there's only a few of them.
But they tend to come from barristers, and there's lots of barristers,
many of which I don't know, some work in IP,
some work in all sorts of other areas.
And it turned out that at the dinner the night before the seminar
was going to be held, the person who'd invited James Miller
I couldn't attend.
So asked if I could escort him, you know, just be the nice host
and escort him to the dinner and make him feel welcome.
And I think at that point I'd just written something about one of Craig Wright's cases,
which was the database right, which we don't need to go into.
But Craig Wright filed cases involving pretty much everything relating to IP.
database right trademarks, the passing of not patents, but copyright.
And I looked into database rights just as my research into, you know,
how can there be this database right in Bitcoin?
It doesn't make sense.
But I looked into the law and researched it thoroughly and wrote an article about it.
And then the week later, I'm invited to this dinner with James Mellor,
who turns out to be the European leading expert on database rights.
as I found out.
I thought, brilliant.
I'll chat to him about this
and talk to,
try and get what he thinks
about database rights in Bitcoin
because I think at that point
I knew that he had something to do
with the Craig Wright cases
that were pending at that point.
They were a long way off coming to trial,
any of them.
But yeah, I thought,
oh, this is great.
I mean, I'll get to meet this guy
and find out what he's like.
So I had dinner with him and said at the time,
I think he volunteered.
I had just been given the job of handling all these,
I think, four or five cases involving Craig Wright.
So I said, well, we'll not talk about Craig Wright then.
I guess that would be silly.
I'm not going to try and sway him on who this guy is.
I think I just said that all I would say is you're going to have to deal with a lot of documents.
Because by that point, we'd already seen the Clyman and Wright trial.
And the Hodlanoff case was already, had that been decided?
I think it had by that point.
McCormack's case as well?
Which one?
McCormack's case.
He was going through it with Craig Wright around that time, I think.
It was a bit different because in Peter McCormack's case,
he'd abandoned the truth defence because he couldn't afford to deal
with all the hundreds of forgeries that Craig Wright was throwing at him.
But in the Hodlennock case and in the Climbing Wright case,
there were all these hundreds of forgeries that came in,
especially in the Hodlennock case.
And there were expert reports in the Hodlennock case that we'd already seen.
they'd already been made public.
So we knew by that point that this guy throws all sorts of lies
and forgeries at the case.
So it was to be expected that this was going to happen in the UK.
I think we might have already seen some of these forgeries appear at that point.
In fact, I'm sure they'd already appeared on the public record by early 2023.
So I said it at that dinner.
I just didn't want to go into any of that
because that's his job.
That's his job to figure out who's telling the truth.
And then we talked about,
and he presented something about patents,
which I forget what it was,
but something important about patents in Europe.
So that's what he was there for.
And then the following year, I went to the trial,
attended the trial for, I think, five days.
so I was sat at the back of the courtroom
How was that?
Was that just bizarre?
It was really bizarre
when Wright was on the stand
It was really
I've only been to see
court cases a couple of times
and this one was
massive
absolutely massive compared to
your average court case
loads of people on both sides
i was following norbert's uh twitter threads and uh susie was there for some of the days and she
was updating everybody i even tuned in i got the the link to watch it on youtube and i could only
manage about like 15 20 minutes and it was him and i like watching and just watching him
tell spurious bullshit lies and i'm like i just i have to turn this off now i literally physically
cannot watch this guy and you know the damage he's caused so many hundreds of thousands of people
millions probably that have invested in this absolute dog shit uh like you know and get up
there and defend himself and just pass this all off this is it was so repulsive is the word i was
looking for so i can't imagine what it's like being there in person and especially like with your
kind of involvement with it with uh with the patent side like seeing all of the crap that
they were trying to claim as their own like it's it's just vile there's one there's one thing i
mean it would would be here for hours and hours if we're talking talking about the whole thing and
um it's it's not worth doing but uh there was one little instance i'll try and find it where
because I was following along and anytime anything patent related came up I thought my
ears pricked up and thought oh I'll just have a look at that and and there was there was one point
in the in the questioning on on one of the days I was there where they talked about this guy called
Jamie Wilson um don't know if you'd heard of him but um he features in the Craig Wright story sort
of a big part in the Craig Wright story.
But it's interesting that the way that he brings in people
is always in support of his version of events.
And it helps if that person is no longer with us,
like Dave Kleiman or the lawyer that he supposedly got stuff,
who got stuff off an unknown user off Reddit or something.
Anyway, the stories that Mark Hunter and Arthur Van Pelt will know in much more detail.
But Jamie Wilson, who is still with us, but he's not been involved in the case at all, really, certainly since the Kleinman case.
But he was – sorry, I'll get back to the point.
Craig Wright was asked about what he claimed to be his early work in Bitcoin, which he said involved this guy, Jamie Wilson.
And this was in Australia in 2011.
And they'd filed a patent.
And Craig Wright said this patent was Bitcoin related.
Initially, I thought, hang on, let me have a look at this.
because all the records on patents, once they've been published,
are part of the public record.
And you can rely on the dates on which things were filed
and what was the case at the time things were filed,
who was the inventor and all that stuff.
So I looked into it because Craig Wright was claiming
this was Bitcoin-related and that it was his invention, effectively.
so I looked into it and it realized that I soon found out that it wasn't filed by Greg Wright it
was filed by Jamie Wilson by himself it was to do with this thing called crypto lock so it was
if you die it gives you gives your heirs access to some documents that you have according to
certain rules so it's a sort of a dead man's switch i suppose you know if if you're if you
die or or you're suddenly no longer with us for some reason then all the things all the important
things that you might have in digital form then become available to other people other designated
people so that's basically the invention um and then jamie wilson filed several applications in
2011 by himself because you can see on the public record it's just him as the inventor
and then craig wright comes along later and adds a few details of oh you can split these
split these permissions up into shamir secret share things stuff that was known at the time
using public private key encryption blah blah blah stuff all stuff that's that was well known in
2011 and nothing to do with Bitcoin and then got his name as inventor on the later application that
was filed so he then turned that into oh it was this was all mine and Jamie Wilson was trying to
um I think he claimed that he was he was trying to sell it to Google or something behind his back
all these ridiculous stories started to come out when it was nothing of the sort and it all easily disproved by just looking at the patent databases And the funny thing about it was in the closing submissions
you remember the guy, Lord Grabener, Casey,
was the sort of lead guy for Craig Wright's side.
And he was doing, on the very final day,
He was doing his closing submissions.
And as part of that, he was talking about Craig Wright
and his early Bitcoin inventions involving Jamie Wilson.
And I was that meme where you sat up on the sofa and go,
that's me.
I've done that.
And I just did a little post saying, I know a bit about this,
and here's something I wrote about it earlier.
And then after the break, there was a break in the morning,
and then they came back, and Lord Grabena said,
oh, we have a slight correction.
Craig Wright wasn't the inventor on this one.
It was Jamie Wilson alone.
And I went, what?
Have you just been reading what I've written?
Obviously they had.
Crazy.
because that the the guy lord grabberner was very thorough i mean you may well have noticed
or if he'd only dipped in and out probably not but he was very very thorough in being above board
and making sure that he didn't lie for his client so he's a extremely experienced barrister
been around a long, long time
and would absolutely not lie for his clients.
No decent barrister would.
So as soon as there was any suggestion
that what he told might have been not quite true,
he was right in there correcting it.
There were another couple of occasions
where he did similar things.
So I thought, okay,
well, I might have had a slight effect on the case there,
but it absolutely wouldn't have changed anything.
um it certainly wouldn't change the outcome but it was interesting
and the story now kind of leads to how you started um looking into some of these patterns
and and just like yeah this is these are outright but yeah how was that making you feel
obviously you're watching this whole thing play out in front of you um you know you've got some
information there and uh which could you know help in some way shape or form uh i'm sure this
yeah i guess when you started digging deeper into these patterns and challenging them
where was what kind of emotion was that coming from
it was really just out of morbid interest i suppose you know i wanted to know what what the
purpose of filing all these applications was for nchain and um and if there was anything that
that could be done about it that that would be of interest because at the time and this was
2022 23 um i was look the more i looked at these well i started looking at these these patterns as
they were published and thought surely they must be invalid because you can't go patterns
you can't go patenting Bitcoin because it's been around for ages.
And then the more I read, the more I realized,
actually, I can sort of see what they're doing,
which is they're putting together an almost random collection of features
and then they're getting it through the system
because they can argue for this random collection of features being novel
and then with a skilled patent attorney,
and they were paying for skilled patent attorneys,
They could argue for it being inventive as well
and then get something granted.
That something that got granted may well be completely useless
that no one would ever infringe.
But still, if they were playing the game of just getting the numbers
to show Calvin Ayer in particular that they got hundreds of patents,
then that was presumably what Craig Wright was all about.
You know, all he wanted was to show to Calvin Ayer that he could get all these hundreds of patents, and then at some point they could be turned into vast amounts of money.
It doesn't work that way, of course, in the real world, but for a con man, and we know Craig Wright is a con man, you can spin that out for many years, as we've seen.
you can spin it out that you know i've got all these patents and and they're all worth millions
and eventually they'll the whole package will be worth billions and i'll i'll be everyone i'll be
able to sue everyone and you'll all have to pay me royalties on on whatever you do in bitcoin
okay i mean people will believe that because the reality is that to look into them into the depth
needed to figure out whether each particular patent is worth something you have to spend a
lot of time and you have to be knowledgeable about how these things work and you have to be someone
like me who's bloody minded and has the knowledge of bitcoin yeah some a friend of mine was saying
well if we think of it in terms of venn diagrams um if you've got three circles you know one circle
is bitcoiners another circle is experienced patent attorneys and another circle is people that are
are sufficiently interested to do anything about it i think that the intersection of those three
is probably just me no one else can be bothered um especially if there's no money involved
nobody's yeah exactly like you're not doing you're doing this in your spare time right it's not as if
anybody who's hired you to right let's go to work here and disprove all of this and like
yeah so so i'd got the point i'd got to about the end of mid to end of 2022 i was reading all
these patterns and thought oh this is this is all a bit pointless because it's you can't really
attack something that's just a random collection of features because you're not going to find a
document that that knocks it out for novelty because they've just added this extra arbitrary
feature and then it becomes difficult then it becomes well you've got to argue for an inventive
step and and that's always subjective and this could this is not worth the effort effectively
and if no one's going to infringe it anyway then it's pointless just let them sit on these patents
and no one's ever going to infringe them and no one need ever attack them so that that's kind of
where where i was i was at i was i was leading towards that position and then then the thing
the thing that triggered me into into getting into well triggered me into getting in touch with
Arthur, actually, was that somebody made a mistake.
So one of their – I'm not going to mention names because I'm a regulated patent attorney.
I'm not supposed to speak about other regulated patent attorneys in derogatory terms.
So I'm going to hold myself back here.
But someone made a mistake and made an amendment on one of their European patent applications
that shouldn't have been made,
and that ended up not being noticed by the European patent examiner
and the two other examiners who signed it off,
as well as the other patent attorney at the firm this one was working with.
So five people didn't notice this error.
The patent got granted.
and then I think it popped up on one of my feeds
and I took a look and within 15 minutes I went, that's dead.
I knew it was dead because there was this esoteric thing
about added matter at the European Patent Office,
which I don't need to go into.
If you make an amendment that adds matter,
you can't remove it after grant and it becomes an impossible trap
that you get into.
so it's called the Article 123 Trap
and I was sure that this had fallen into it
and I spoke to a couple of colleagues of mine
and said look at this and tell me what you think
and again within 15 minutes they came back and went
oh that's dead
so I thought okay well this will be quite fun
but what you have to do is you have to pay
pay a fee to oppose a patent
you pay an opposition fee which is about
I think it's about 900 euros
so I'm not going to
pay that myself
I'm already doing all this work for free
just for the fun of it
and then
so Arthur went
and announced
on Twitter
would anyone like to fund
an opposition on one of
Nchain's patents and we ended up
getting over 2000 pounds
just like that, just within a day or two.
In Bitcoin, by any chance, as well, was that?
Sorry?
Were they Bitcoin donations?
They were all made in Bitcoin, yeah.
Someone changed, someone lightning.
And there was, I should big up one particular donor,
which was Bittylicious, the exchange.
I think they're based in the island man UK based anyway.
So they they stumped up the entire opposition fee for one of them, which is nice of them.
And they one of the defendants in the BSV claims case which has failed at the Supreme Court recently So they they yeah they stumped up one of the defendants in the BSV claims case which has failed at the Supreme Court recently So they stumped up one of the fees
I then did a bit of work.
I mean, the whole opposition took me probably a couple of hours to write.
It wasn't long. It didn't need to be long.
It was just a, here's a grenade, we're going to throw it in
and then stand back and see what happens.
Because once you point out the fact that this thing is irretrievably,
flawed, there's nothing more that you really need to do.
You file the opposition, and then you can just stand back
and let nature take its course effectively.
So, I mean, we didn't do that, but filed the opposition,
and it took about...
These things take about 18 months to work their way through.
So filed it in late 2022.
That then worked its way through the system.
The attorney who'd made the mistake tried to dig themselves out of a hole that was impossible to dig themselves out of and just made the thing worse.
And then they ended up switching attorneys just before they were going to have oral proceedings.
So the hearing before the senior examiners.
And then I think it was maybe a week, it might have been just a week or so before the hearing was due to be held.
And the new attorney obviously realized that this thing was dead,
and then they decided to revoke it themselves.
So they just threw in the towel and said, no, we want it revoked.
So they gave up, which was a bit disappointing
because we didn't end up going to the hearing to win the case.
But since I was doing it for free, that was fine.
I mean, it would have taken me more time that I wasn't being paid for to do that.
So that was the first one.
How many of these did you – that must have given you some motivation
to carry on, like, leafing through?
Yeah, the first one was only because it was an easy win.
And I thought, well, we'll just do one.
But because we ended up getting all these donations, we had enough to do three.
and I thought
can we, so it turned out
that this one application
this one patent was part of a group
of three
all from the same
priority filing back in 2016
that were all related
to a very similar invention
which is about, I don't know if you
know Craig Wright's obsession with
Bitcoin being Turing complete
Yeah
There's a
terrible paper that he's written on the subject
and there's a YouTube video of him
going on about it. He's gone on about
it lots of times. I think he may well have
brought it up in the trial a few times as well.
But he's got this obsession with
Turing completeness
and he claims BSV is Turing complete
and it's just a
it's just the difference between
doing
logical operations
and also being able to do
looped operations. So if you can do simple logical operations, XOR, AND, NAND, NOR, etc.,
AND, you can do loops, then you can do effectively any computation, which is what all Turing
completeness means. And Bitcoin is deliberately not Turing complete because Satorci decided
that he didn't want Bitcoin scripts to be open-ended
in when they were run,
because that could cause unstoppable bugs.
So if you run a script and it doesn't end,
then that's a bit of a problem.
You want scripts that can only run and stop at a definite end.
So you don't want loops.
So that was a deliberate decision.
And Craig Wright's idea was, no, let's put loops in.
Or these patents were to do with the one that got revoked first
was using a Bitcoin transaction to do an XOR operation.
Okay, an XOR is just you put in a one, you've got two inputs.
If either of those two inputs is one, the output is one.
If both of them are zero or one, the output is zero.
So that's an XOR.
and the XOR is available in
Bitcoin script, it's one of the opcodes
from the original
implementation but that was
removed
so that was prior art
and then the
invention was really just
using that output of a
Bitcoin transaction to do something
so
the funny example
in the patent was
a dog feeder
and
seriously, a dog feeder.
I've got this example in front of me.
I don't need to read them all.
Paragraph 86, if our listeners want to look into this
in any more detail,
paragraph 86 of European Patent 3449450B1
says, as an example of this invention,
we will describe how control system works
using an example of Carroll's two dogs
named Archimedes and Bertrand,
who are left alone all day in the backyard
and they are both friendly to each other
provided they do not eat at the same time
which for some reason causes them to become aggressive
and fight each other.
And they have RFID collars
and they're detectable by an Internet of Things device.
So the idea is that when one dog comes up to the feeder
it can get fed.
When the other dog comes up to the feeder
it can get fed.
But when both dogs come up to the feeder, they don't get fed, which is an XOR operation.
So what we do is we use these RFID tags on the dogs to interact with the IoT device on the dog feeder that then sends a Bitcoin transaction.
And then the output of that Bitcoin transaction tells the dog feeder whether to feed the dog.
Okay.
That is effectively the invention.
And you read that and think, right?
I mean, that's pretty pointless.
Talk about overly complicating things.
But yeah, that was the invention in all three of these patents.
So the first one was invalid for a different reason.
It wasn't novel or inventive.
the second and third ones
they were for
variations on that, it wasn't an XOR
it was another logical operation
or whatever
so they were slightly different
in what they claimed
and what I used was
Andreas Antonopoulos'
book
and
used that properly because the European
Patent Office Examiner had
cited that book
during prosecution.
And the skilled patent attorney that got it through the system
managed to persuade the examiner that there was something there
and allowed it to be granted.
And I looked at the book again and went,
no, because it's got all the stuff in there.
And there's no way this is, even if it's new,
there's no way it's inventive because it's got,
the book has got everything in it, all the options.
So the second one got revoked for, I think it was lack of novelty.
They threw lots and lots of options.
I mean, they fought back on that one and did quite a good job of trying to rescue it, but failed.
And on the other one, the European Patents Office actually found a new problem with it,
again, added matter, and that got revoked as well.
So three out of three got revoked.
which was pretty good
and they've appealed
I thought there was no point
with them appealing these cases
because you can appeal the decision
to revoke them
the first one they obviously didn't appeal
because they revoked it themselves
the second and third one
they filed an appeal early last year
so
it's still going on
these things work their way through the system
it'll probably take another year to get anywhere
but I might do something on it.
I might not.
Who knows?
Are you looking at any more now
or are you just like done?
That was just a bit of fun.
It was, well, the purpose of doing it
was just out of interest.
And I was on the point of giving up in 2022 anyway
because I thought, well, this is pointless anyway.
So the only reason I filed the first one
is because I thought this was an easy target.
So it's an open goal.
You might as well.
and the other two were just because we got the money to do them
so I thought I have to do something rather than just giving the money back.
But I didn't really see any point in wasting any more time on this.
There's really little point in attacking these patents.
Lots of them are so narrow or just clearly invalid.
Some of them are claiming all sorts of things.
We haven't got time to go into the details of some of them,
but they're claiming all sorts of things.
And Craig Wright has made all sorts of noises over the years of, you know,
he's got a patent for this and that and vaguely threatening to sue people
over what he's got.
Never actually done it.
They've never actually initiated infringement proceedings on anyone.
I mean, it's not to say they won't, but it's a bit of a sign that, you know,
makes all these threats and then nothing ever happens,
which suggests that
there's not much substance
behind these threats
and
What a strange old saga, really.
Just the whole thing.
And yeah, still pretty speechless about it, really.
I mean, he took up so much time and energy and money
of so many different people.
And like I said...
The frustrating thing is that he's still doing it
because after we thought it had all been finished
with the contempt hearing, and he was found in contempt
and got this suspended prison sentence,
and he's got the restraining order against,
the general civil restraining order against him
to prevent him from filing any new claims,
so that's all on so he can't he's effectively been neutered in in terms of what he can do
through the courts at least in the uk uh but recently he's come back again and he's you know
we've seen him interview i don't know if you've seen him being interviewed with um
uh the coast guy what's his name neil oh no way really neil oliver neil oliver that's that's the
He's had Craig Wright on.
Neil Oliver's had Craig Wright on recently,
a couple of months ago, talking about BSV.
And Neil Oliver's completely taken in by all this
and repeating all the same lines that we hear
from all the BSV lunatics.
And, you know, you were there at Bitfest
when Dominic Frisbee was there.
He must have had a chat with him.
And I went up to him and just said,
asked him why
Neil Oliver has been taken
in by Craig Wright because
Dominic said
I've met the guy several
times on GB News
he had a little slot on GB News and Dominic Frisby
has been on there with him
and clearly didn't
manage, there are some people you just can't
you can't persuade
and he's
Neil Oliver's best mates with Efrat Fennigson
as well, you must know of
Neil Oliver's been on Robert Breedlove's show
yeah
and I think
what is it
are these people just too
credulous I mean is there a particular type
of person who's just so
credulous that
any sort of conspiracy theory
will bring them in
I don't know
there's an element to that because there was
someone else that was involved
appeared in the trial.
She was there with Dolores Carhill.
Yes, she's another one.
She's another one. She was there at the back of the trial
and had to be told to stop nodding.
That's what I'm saying.
Justice Miller.
Yeah, a funny moment in one of the days,
I'm not sure one of the days I was there,
but she was in the back of the courtroom
with Scott Gillis,
nodding away and had to be told to stop.
She's another one
who's been pulled into this BSV conspiracy theory realm.
Yeah, you see, I think that I've come up against this movement
of truthers or freedom fighters, you know, and yeah,
I think as soon as you throw the word like cabal at them,
they're in, like, you got me.
But, you know, yeah, fuck those guys.
you know it's uh yeah and especially if you can identify a front man you know i'm apparently the
the guy who's who's in in charge or i was the story was that i was telling mr justice miller
what to do uh maybe on instructions from jack dorsey or maybe i was telling jack dorsey what
to do. So apparently the cabal
is me, Jack Dorsey, and
Mr. Justice Miller.
Okay, that's a bit strange.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think it was
true.
I'm just a regular guy. I don't move in those circles
really. I happen to have met the judge a couple of
times, but he's met lots of people.
Oh my goodness.
Well, if there's...
Well, this is the thing. There will be no BSB
investors listening to this story.
because I remember when I did the episode with Mark and Arthur
about their book, Fake Toshi,
which is now becoming like four volumes, I think,
because they do the deep research.
Oh, 33.
They're restricted.
Right.
They're going to cut themselves off at three.
Good for them.
As soon as I put that episode out, like, boom, straight underneath.
like BSV crowd, toxic, you know, really.
And I'm thinking, are these bots?
I hope they're bots because this is weird.
It's difficult to tell.
I think there are, they like you to think there are more of them
than there actually are.
so they may
they may have multiple
accounts, that's one way of doing it
whether
that you call it a bot or not
it's a matter of just definitions
but I'm pretty sure
that some of the leading ones
have multiple accounts and they
just try and amplify
the noise that way
especially people like
Kurt Wookert, he's definitely
got a few sock puppets around who sorry kurt wicket jr you must have heard of him no uh coin
geek uh he deeply unpleasant character uh but he he a sort of front man for for calls himself a bitcoin historian but you know you don want to look into him He not a nice character
Right, okay.
No, I'm certainly done with all of that kind of side of things,
and I was hoping, like many, that, you know,
as soon as that hammer fell, that would be the end of it.
But whatever, man, like, you know.
it's not because
Craig Wright is making a comeback
and the patents still keep getting
granted, they've dropped a few
over the last year or so
I mean there's a little bit of tailing off but
they're still spending millions per year
I mean several million
just keeping this thing going
And Dan, is that still
Calvin, like bankrolling that?
It has to be
who else is doing it?
I think it's all coming from Calvin
doubling down
doubling down yeah
maybe
what's the thing
sunk cost fallacy
maybe he's deep into that
who knows
maybe he still believes that Craig is Satoshi
some people do
it's the most laughable thing
it really is
right well
David, what else did we need to cover?
Was there anything else that we were going to touch upon?
I don't think we did it in the order you said,
but yeah, we did the Avi first, but thanks to Lauren.
But yeah, I mean, we didn't really cover the whole,
as you put it, the whole libertarian, non-patent thing,
but for anyone who's interested in that,
I did do an interview with Stefan Kinsella last year.
So if any of the listeners, viewers are interested,
they can look that one up.
I kind of have to be ambivalent on that at best
because it's my job.
I'm not going to come out and say, no, patents are terrible.
We shouldn't have them.
But I can see both sides.
I mean, Stephan Kinsella has interesting points of view on that, especially because he is a qualified patent attorney as well.
So he's worth paying attention to.
And there are some people who make coherent arguments about patents being generally on balance, not a good thing.
But there are arguments on both sides.
And you don't have a control group, really.
You know, how can you say, but these things come around.
I noticed recently there's the argument of, well, we shouldn't have patents.
We should have prizes.
That seems to come out every so often.
So, you know, the argument will carry on,
but I don't really see the patent system ending anytime soon.
And how does that kind of vibe with open source everything?
You know, this is obviously something big in the Bitcoin and Nostra arena.
It's like, let's just go open source, free market, let the chips fall where they may.
Can we have both?
Yes, because that is how much of the internet actually works on open source software.
much of what's behind lots of web servers is based on Apache,
which is purely open source.
And you've got people who, you know,
all the back end of the way the whole internet works is, you know,
some of it may well at some point have been patented, but it's not anymore.
So it's all effectively free to use.
And lots of it started out as open source.
so you've got characters like
I don't know what he's doing now
if he's even still with us but Richard Stallman
was one of those
characters who's big
on that, very anti-patent
and he had some good
points, I went to see
Richard Stallman when I was in
my MSC in London in 2003
and he's
very good, very persuasive
points about you shouldn't
patent this
but then you could take the
take the view that, well, there are certain areas where patents don't really work so well.
So maybe things like internet protocols or Bitcoin or, you know, cryptography,
there shouldn't really be patents because they work better as open source, maybe.
But then you also got the arguments, well,
Well, SHA-256 was an invention of the NSA, and that was patented.
And that's the basis on which much of Bitcoin relies to work.
So, you know, there are things that come in via the patent system
or using the patent system that everyone ends up using.
So things like Schnorr signatures, which weren't in the original Bitcoin system,
protocol, but that was because they were still patented. But once the patent expired,
then they could be used. So I think they're part of Taproot. So these things, if you take a longer
timescale, because patents can only last 20 years, there's lots of useful innovations that will come
through and be made public through the patent system that then over time, if they're useful
enough, they will become used and disseminated. And maybe in some cases, you just have to wait
until the patent expires before they actually get used. So whether that's a good thing or whether
patents are a slow down innovation, I don't know. I'm not sure they do. Because, you know,
my argument to that would be well how much faster do you want things to go Because things things develop pretty quickly And there plenty of people out there who do there who have the attitude that well we just do it Don ask for permission just do it
And if someone comes along and tries to sue them later with their patents,
then that's just the way the world works.
Often they'll fail, sometimes they'll win.
It's just, you know, that's what happens.
there's
one of the arguments
I started to read Seyfrieden's new book
Gold Standard
I think I only got just behind me
I got by the look of it
about a third of the way through before I got too
frustrated with it because I think
it's terrible but it starts off quite
well and one of the arguments
is that the Wright
brothers stopped
the development of
airplane technology
because they had a patent on airplanes, effectively.
How you control surfaces, I think it was, on airplanes.
And they sued everyone.
And the argument, Saferdean's argument would be that
the airplane industry in the United States
was held up for years and years
because of the rights patents,
whereas it developed much quicker in Europe
because the rights patents weren't applied in Europe.
And you take that and think, okay, maybe he's got a point.
But you don't really have the counterfactual.
I'm prepared.
I can see the arguments of both sides.
Maybe it's dependent on the technology area.
Who knows?
But it's one of those, you can't come to a definitive conclusion
because we don't have a control.
hmm very interesting yeah um and stefan kinsella yeah i've listened to him on on
saver dean's podcast i've not seen the interview did you go on his podcast and have or were you on
i've not met saver dean i don't think he'd i don't think we get on
i liked his first first three books his latest one i think is terrible
okay i've not read it yet uh so yeah i'm looking uh looking forward to dig into that
all right well I guess we should end it
on the usual question
if you had one last orange pill
left to give to somebody who would you give it to
and why
well
I would just say Neil Oliver because I think
he's the one that we've just been talking
about and
he's got quite a big audience
so I think it's just out of frustration
that someone
that otherwise knowledgeable and respectable
and worth looking up to.
Because I think he's great otherwise.
It would be nice to just go, come on,
just take the orange pill and understand properly.
Well, we can only keep our fingers crossed.
And hopefully he will see through.
I mean, apparently we're part of a cult,
but I mean, wow.
Yeah, well, the trouble is,
if you really are in a cult,
you'd always deny that you are,
wouldn't you?
At least to the outside world.
Yep.
So maybe we are.
One of the other definitions of a cult is it has to have an enigmatic leader,
right?
So...
Satoshi's pretty enigmatic.
But, yeah.
A living being leader, I suppose.
when you were to look at somebody that runs the camp
that everybody flocks to, which is what Craig is.
Michael Saylor, Max Kaiser.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Neither of which.
Oh, Satoshi.
Yeah.
Oh, well, we're part of a cult.
What can I tell you?
sound money cult
yep
we shall see how it plays out
where can people
reach out to you
and are you going to be around
any of the conferences if anybody wants to reach
out and carry on the conversation
or perhaps be
inspired to delve into more
patents and you might
kick somebody off down
another rabbit hole
well I write
a bit about
patents and I've written a few articles on Bitcoin patents over the years.
If you want to look at those, you can go to tuftythecat.com.
Tufty the Cat, right, okay.
We didn't get into the doxing, which is a story in itself,
but I did mention that story on my one with Stefan Kinsella.
So, yeah, if you want to know how Tufty the Cat came to be
and how he was doxed, that's in there.
But, yeah, I'm on X as Tufty the Cat as well.
It's caused me a bit of trouble in being a regulated patent attorney,
but, you know, I try and be careful.
Try not to be derogatory to too many people,
but still get into trouble occasionally.
Okay.
Well, I'll make sure that that's all in the show notes
and people can reach out.
Right.
Well, thanks for coming on.
By my real name, if you didn't introduce me, David Pearce,
I'm a patent attorney.
and I work at Barker-Brittel.
So this is a patent attorney firm in Birmingham.
So if anyone wants any real patent work done,
you can find me there.
Excellent. All right, mate.
Well, have a good evening and thanks for coming on
and thanks for sharing everything.
Thanks very much, Daniel. It's a pleasure.
See you, mate.
Well, thank you again, David, for coming on.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
like I said at the beginning here of this show,
if you are one of the people out there
that are holding BSV as an investment strategy I hope this has helped round out your knowledge and your education about the people behind that project what they potentially stand for and whether or not you
should be rethinking or trusting them. Again, decision is completely yours. Like I said,
take from this what you will. And if you got this far in, your interest has been piqued,
I have another episode. I will repeat that episode again. It was called Fake Toshi. It was released on the 27th of August, 2025. And it features Mark and Arthur, who are co-authors of the book that had been following the story for close to 10 years.
so they deep deep research on this whole topic so it's worthy of your time I would say certainly
certainly worthy of your time if you've invested in it because if you hold it and you've invested
in it the more you know about the investment that you hold the better it's that simple and
if you are resisting listening because of facts that you might find out that's that's the red flag
that's the that's your inner self telling you uh you know what was it ryan holiday the obstacle
is the way uh it's the uncomfortable conversations that we need to have or listen to uh to be able to
move forward and yeah I just implore anybody that's holding the asset to learn as much about
it as they possibly can that's it enough said a really interesting chat with David like he said
right there at the end there if you're interested and need any kind of advice or patent work then
he was always going to be available to Bitcoiners anyway to have a chat because that's what we do
right we connect with each other we share our expertise and that's the network well we are the
network and building out the social layer of bitcoin is as important if not more important
than anything else here because if we do not reach the people we need to reach this thing just stays
niche and it never gets off the ground it will never become a global medium exchange which is
what it was designed to do and what it needs to become if we can all escape the the fiat system
that has been literally designed to suck away your purchasing power and your energy and just
destroy the communication across the marketplace. You cannot communicate value with fiat currency.
You just can't. Everything is distorted. That's why we just see malinvestment after malinvestment
after malinvestment and it's easy to point at crooked politicians or crooked mafioso or crooked
criminals over here or whatever but they're being led their decisions being led by incentives that
have been planted in the in the um in the seed of fiat currency for centuries and we are not
going to move forward unless we move away from that system. Parallel system. Great book by Brian
DeMint, by the way, Parallel. You can go and read that or read that. Pick up Jeff Booth's book.
That's a great book to get into as well, The Price of Tomorrow. And keep learning.
Knuths von Holm's written some great books as well. I'm randomly shilling books here. I don't
know why but you know these are these are incredibly important books for you to pick up
and and start learning about uh because if you if you've not figured out yet that you know bitcoin
isn't there for you to be able to stack more fiat bitcoin is there for you to escape fiat uh there's
you know just keep learning just keep falling down the rabbit hole one one inch at a time
It's not going to happen overnight.
This isn't a get rich quick scheme.
This is a become free, slowly and purposefully scheme.
And I'm here for it.
So thank you everybody for listening.
Go stack your sats with Relay.
R-E-L-A-I.ch forward slash Bitten.
Pay close attention to what paywithflash.com are going to start building.
And Club Orange.
Go and meet some people over at Club Orange.
But please take self-custody of your Bitcoin.
Bitbox.swiss forward slash Bitten.
You can use the code Bitten, get 5% off, get the Bitbox O2 or the Bitbox Nova.
They're fully Bitcoin only hardware wallets that are going to help you take complete control of your Bitcoin.
And there's been a lot of phishing attacks coming out at the beginning of 2026.
A lot of sad stories are going to hit the wire.
I am sure of it.
more people are going to have been hacked or fallen for an email scam or fallen for a
clicked a link in a telegram chat or something. Stay vigilant. Stay as vigilant as you possibly
can. Keep learning. And I looked up an old money proverb today. A fool and his money are parted
quickly or something along those lines. Yeah, a fool and his money are soon parted.
apply that to Bitcoin. A fool and his Bitcoin are soon parted. Now, I don't want to call you a fool
because that obviously is a very derogatory term. But if you're not self-custodying your Bitcoin,
there's just a little bit of extra learning that you need to do. Like I said, one inch at a time,
keep falling down the rabbit hole. Get over to bitbox.swiss, read up on their offering there.
They've got the two Bitcoin-only wallets. Read their blogs, watch their videos. There's lots of
educational resources out there and keep learning. Please keep learning. That's all we can do.
I hope you've enjoyed this one. With David, please reach out if you have any questions.
Catch you on the next show and thank you as always for listening.